Jamie Drummond

Jamie Drummond co-founded the advocacy organization DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) with Bono, Bobby Shriver, and others in 2002 and ONE in 2004. The two entities merged in 2008 under the name ONE. DATA, ONE, and its partners have helped persuade the Bush Administration and bipartisan leadership in the US Congress to launch a series of initiatives for Africa including the Millennium Challenge Account, the President’s Emergency AIDS initiative, the Malaria Initiative, Multilateral Debt Relief, and the African Growth and Opportunity Act.

Author contributions

Ten years ago, on April 5th 2005, at a launch featuring Brad Pitt, Bono, Djimon Hounsou and the late great Jack Valenti, we launched this iconic ONE ad. In stark black and white featuring many of the most famous stars of that time (and today) from Ellen DeGeneres and Viola Davis to Clooney, Pitt, Pacino, Hanks,…...

One of the most-followed events in Africa, the 2015 Cup of Nations (AFCON) football tournament, has kicked off. Eight teams are in action over the weekend and I’ll be watching to see who makes it through these first few matches. As well as being the start of the tournament and a chance to watch stars…...

Global citizens of the world unite – for this year we have an historic world leaders summit and a confluence of conferences. There have never been so many gatherings of the great and the good, but it’s all globaloney – without you. World leaders will be deciding all our fates for us, so we need…...

Hello ONErs – Hooray! We made it! – It’s ONE-ONE day! The reason we set up ONE a decade ago was to help make sure some wishes – like those we humans make at this time of year – aren’t just forgotten in a vague haze of aspiration, but get done and delivered: that promises…...

I’d just asked the kids clustered in the classroom, “Which of you is about 14 years old, or born around the year 2000?”. A swarm of hands shot up, and with the help of Happy, a local youth activist from the excellent Restless Development, we picked out 15 teens that will be 15 in 2015.…...

Have you read the news today? Does anyone else feel that, what with the assault from Ebola, Boko Haram, ISIS, corruption, droughts here, floods there, global inequality, insecurity… the world risks being stuck in a downward spiral? Well, join the club. But also: join the movement that’s doing something real about it. On......

This week, ONE celebrates 10 years of campaigning with members and partner organizations around the world. We’ve come a long way together At ONE we believe injustice in the world is a preventable, treatable condition, one that can be cured by dealing with an underlying malaise – something called apathy. ONE is an expe......

UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Bono, and Nigerian finance minister/ONE Board Member Ngozi Okonjo Iweala at a panel last week at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Photo credit: Associated Press. As Bono noted at an event Friday evening high in the Swiss Alps, there were two notes all could hear hanging in the air…...

Normally you could be accused of being a bit flaky or a bit of a hippy if you talk about oneness, interdependence, and all that. But not now. Last week Mandela’s legacy cloaked the world with a zeit of Ubuntu geist; President Obama articulated this Ubuntu oneness in his memorable speech and Pope Francis reinforced this&hel......

Erik Charas is a campaigning journalist in Mozambique. He was recently arrested by local officials for asking government leaders difficult questions about shady deals done in Mozambique’s natural resources extraction sector. Whether “Africa keeps its promise” to its people, the theme of this year’s World Economic Foru......

How can Chinese investments and aid for Africa be leveraged to help more kids can get vaccinated, make anti-malarial bed nets more available, achieve food security for families and ensure that more African youth gain employment? There are two particularly important sectors to consider when asking this question -– investment......

I started this year traveling across Africa with Bono visiting places we hadn’t been for nearly a decade. One of these was northern Ghana. Ghana is often held up as a success story of development. It has a stable democracy, fast growing economy and has already met the Millennium Development Goal to halve extreme poverty.&he......

Last month I was invited to speak at TED Global in Edinburgh. TED is an organisation devoted to ideas worth spreading. So I wanted to share with you my talk and an idea we’re working on with partners at ONE that I think needs spreading… In a few years’ time the Millennium Development Goals, which…...

Ten years ago today, at a small press conference in New York, Bono and Bill Gates launched an activist entity called DATA, with start-up funds from Mr Gates, George Soros and Ed Scott. I was one of the founders, along with Bobby Shriver and Lucy Matthew, and appointed the executive director. Though we started small,…...

This blog post originally appeared on AfricanArguments.org It’s over a month since famine was declared in Somalia and alarm bells clearly rung about serious food shortages across Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. 12 million people in the Horn of Africa are in desperate need of food, clean water and basic sanitation and ......

ONE’s Co-Founder and Executive Director Jamie Drummond writes about his personal journey to Ethiopia: Twenty five years ago, like many of my generation, I was called to action by images of drought and starvation – and by a couple of shaggy-haired, Irish rock stars with whom I’ve now been working for a decade. The Et......